


Bakekujira

by wanderNavi



Series: wanderNavi Sampler [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, I wouldn’t count this as horror, Post-Canon, Spirits, but I’m also someone who reads about genocides and state-sanctioned famines before bed, continuing my policy of ignoring everything that isn’t from the show, make of that what you will, shopping trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: The long stem of the pipe flicked between her sharp fingers and the spirit allowed, “Then speak, you who the humans call Lord of Fire, and speak, you who the humans call Chief of Water.” The dark glint of her eyes narrowed. “Keep it quick.”Katara and Zuko go to a fairy market.
Relationships: Katara & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: wanderNavi Sampler [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1708303
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Bakekujira

To her great indignation, Zuko immediately hooked his arm around hers and said to Katara, “Don’t get lost.”

She squeezed out of the way of an ambling cart in sea-shimmer turquoise and teal, glinting with a greenish-gold filigree, and ducked under the heavy spools of braided cloth and paper that hung in thick cords above the crowded stalls. Pressed tight against his side, she hissed, “Of course I’m not,” but made no move to draw away. A young boy with no mouth and veiled eyes called out to their right, “ _Tears of remorse, tears of joy; for sale!_ ”

“Let’s just not take any chances,” Zuko muttered, his fingers stiffly gripping his sleeve.

A frog swaddled in five layers of shimmering violet and azure croaked out, “Ten thousand beats of a mouse’s heart.”

“ _Limb swap! Get yourself a new helping hand!_ ” “ _Wine brewed from Queen of the Night nectar, plucked under the full harvest moon._ ” “ _Enchanted mirrors and crystal familiars!_ ”

Katara breathed into the cotton lined surface of her mask and she asked her companion, “Why didn’t we take Sokka with us again?”

Zuko’s wooden mask twitched to her incredulously. “The market would eat him immediately. He has no haggling ability.”

She cast an eye over a shelf of bags – “ _two-ton capacity; make a hole in the world_ ” – and wryly agreed. “Too tempting. You’re right.”

Past an owl-winged crier hawking the news, past a tank full of fish a purer black than the depths of a bottomless hole, Zuko led her through the jostling crowd of peddling spirits. A thick smell of cooking oil filled the air, along with the sharp pinches of incense and the faint fragrance of spiced, hot drinks. They turned a corner into another alley of the market, stepping around a crowd of entranced children with perked up ears and twitching tails and shimmering eyes watching as a stall’s artisan spun roaring dragons and prowling tigers from golden, melted sugar. A phoenix of thin caramel lines perched on a wooden stick blinked at Katara, then chirped at the small kitsune eagerly buying the candy treat with a memory of a gilded, perfect autumn sunset.

“It should be this way,” Zuko said, and pulled them towards a tent draped in orange and purple velvet glinting with tiny gemstones sewn into the cloth by the hundreds and thousands.

* * *

The whale came during that clear glowing hour of the sun rising from the sea, streaking the sky with bands of pink, of green, of gold, gold, gold. The fishermen already toiled at their labor for over a complete hour before, while pure darkness swallowed the coast and then the palest blue blush began to emerge in the sky and across the land. In the town’s slow drift into lucidity and the controlled urgency of the fishermen’s work, no one knew how the whale approached the shore; one moment the seas were empty, one moment it was there.

It was the screaming of the birds that alerted the villagers.

* * *

Before they stepped inside the tent – or rather, Zuko dragged them both in – Katara sent one last lingering glance at the moon, heavy and yellow as a fresh yolk, where it hung in the abyssal blue. _Watch over us, please_ , she asked it. _We’ll take all the help we can get with negotiating_.

Uncharacteristically, Zuko lingered too; the two of them blocked the tent’s entrance, not that anyone tried getting in or out. She glanced over at him and saw his tense shoulders, the deep rising and falling of his chest, his silent breaths displayed loud and clear. Not lingering, Katara corrected herself. Centering.

He squeezed her arm, still hooked to his, once, and said, “Remember, don’t think about your children’s names. Guard your most precious memories, but don’t put them completely out of mind, or you might lose them. Try not to mention—”

“—Aang too much, I know,” she reminded him. Zuko went through the whole set of rules three times already.

After one more deep breath, he nodded and they stepped inside.

When the cloth curtain swung shut behind them, the merry noise of the market abruptly and completely cut off. Zuko’s left hand twitched, curling slightly, then fell back limp. Katara blinked at the dim haze filling the cavernous tent with pale smoke that smelled of unknown flowers that bloomed only when the dark side of the moon faced the still ground. The silence pressed down with cold curiosity.

She squinted through the dim, but the walls stretched on and on; she couldn’t see the other side of the room through the smoke, darkness swallowing whole the faintly twinkling gems. The rows of lanterns extended deep into the infinite gloom.

Zuko stepped forward first. When he didn’t glance backwards to the entrance that must surely be gone by now, nor did Katara. The smoke swirled past their legs in whirlpool eddies and clung to her pants with faint, pulling grasps. Words surfaced upon her tongue in swells of loose emotions, to the rhythm of her heartbeat, to the flow of tides. She kept her mouth shut.

Half an hour later, the ground began crunching under their unfaltering footsteps. The lamps flanking their path flickered without the crackle or snap of hungry flames consuming wood or swallowing oil. Darkness pressed against their pale masks.

The raised platform grew by miniscule margins until it suddenly swelled and filled her whole vision. At the base of the long stairs, Zuko paused for a single stuttered moment. Katara pulled him forward unhesitatingly by their linked arms. They climbed the glinting steps, and he shifted their hold on each other, keeping each other anchored by their hands instead.

At first, Toph wanted to come with Zuko, instead of having Katara accompanying him. And Zuko had considered it, arms crossed and talking through his thoughts. “The spirits won’t be able to fool you by sight. And the ground might be more truthful to you than words.”

He yanked on his sleeve in slight absentmindedness and grimaced apologetically at their younger friend. “But this is a dispute involving the sea. It would be better if someone—”

“—who is more attuned to the water went,” Toph finished and shoved at his arm. “Then I’ll just hold the fort here for you with Izumi while you and Katara go shopping.”

“Trading,” Zuko corrected.

“It’s a market, isn’t it? Shopping.”

The lamps didn’t accompany Katara and Zuko up the steps. Instead, the stairs glowed with an unnatural light, not a glowstone’s strong gleam, but instead a metallic shade like liquid mercury. Veins of cinnabar red and arsenic green and wolfsbane purple shimmered across their feet.

When they reached the top, the sea of pinprick lights below sunk into the smoke, hidden by the depths. A small girl seated in the chair carved out of bone and decorated with lacework was already waiting for them with a long pipe cradled in her left hand.

* * *

The villagers sent a messenger bearing the distress call as soon as they could, on the fastest ostrich horse they had. Her cousin served in the war, so she knew the route to the nearest military outpost, two days ride away, best. The others left behind in the village shut their doors, hid the children away, and grimly waited as the sea turned a lurid red. Three months later, the sickly smell of the dead water still lingered.

* * *

The girl took another drag of the incense packed into her pipe and blew the smoke back out, her pure black eyes watching the two humans standing before her. Dead creatures writhed in the silver cloud: a leviathan of gleaming scales, a five-eyed bird with blades for feathers, a tongueless salamander coated in ghostly flames.

She slowly swung her legs down from the armrest she propped them on. The thin bangles around her ankles chattered with the pure ringing of fine crystal bells as her feet met the ground and she pulled herself out of her lax slouch. When she opened her mouth, her words wrote themselves in the glinting haze from the pipe and she said, “The Great Spirits aren’t interested in talking to you.”

“Then a proxy to hear our message,” said Zuko. The grimace of his mask flickered in the unsteady light. The hours spent in the sunless and starless darkness pressed his voice into laminated steel, pounded flat by his determination and the heat of his responsibilities as lord of his people.

“We don’t leave until we’ve made a fair deal,” Katara demanded.

The girl’s thin eyebrows rose and her too large eyes did not blink. Her stone lips twitched unemotionally around the bit of her pipe. Its cup flared the blue of midnight with her inward breath. She murmured, not to herself, “A little prince of flames and a small winter tide here to make demands. Well.”

A stately fox of smoke curled around her sharp, smooth hair. Zuko’s hand squeezed Katara’s in warning before she could speak. Her mouth, he must have known, had already opened. Back when they were packing, while he dug out a worn and ancient mask and handed it over to her, he warned, “These spirits aren’t like the ones you and Aang had experience with. Nor are they the kinds Uncle made friends with. They’re…trickier. Though just as proud.” The last part, he said under his breath.

Besides, the task laid out before them asked plenty enough out of them before Katara or Zuko accidentally angered the spirits they sought out for assistance. Walking between the fine line of presumptuous demands and gaining nothing at all, Katara subsided to Zuko’s lead for now. He had more experience in these dealings.

“Three months ago, a ghost whale manifested at a fishing village,” Zuko explained. “My people sent for help, but this incident is beyond their mortal capabilities, and thus I represent their request.”

The pipe swung to point at Katara. “And her?”

Here Katara spoke for herself, “A daughter of the sea to match a son of the flame. I’m here to lend my support to his trade.”

The girl sighed on her chair of bone, miniscule in the darkness and before the towering columns stretching into infinity behind her, four pillars bearing the marks of their elements. The long stem of the pipe flicked between her sharp fingers and she allowed, “Then speak, you who the humans call Lord of Fire, and speak, you who the humans call Chief of Water.” The dark glint of her eyes narrowed. “Keep it quick.”

* * *

How to describe the heavyset captain of the military outpost on duty when a young woman with her hair in complete loose disarray and her ostrich horse exhausted from the pace of her frantic journey? He gaped at her tale, her scratched and wringing hands, the half-choked stutter of her breath. When she spoke of the looming skeleton, the great jaw and spine, he ordered her out of his camp and slammed the door shut.

Disaster already trailed in her wake, the poor girl who never made it back home.

* * *

Three years after the war ended, when they had been so much younger and Zuko finally slept more than four hours a night, Katara faced Sokka in a fight over who would stay at the South Pole learning to be Hakoda’s successor and who would go to the Earth Kingdom, and maybe eventually the Fire Nation too, as ambassador. From the sidelines, Suki watched, amused and intrigued.

What felt like half the camp came out to observe the siblings’ match. The rest stayed in the main village of Kyoshi Island, unable to leave the urgent trade tasks the Water Tribe delegation came to the island for on its way deeper into Earth Kingdom waters. Bato stood between Katara and Sokka and he declared the start to the fight.

Steel shattered ice.

Technically, a fight like this should have remained at the South Pole, but the environmental advantage Katara would have over her brother skewed the fight too harshly. Kyoshi Island offered its neutral land and a promise to keep the affairs quiet towards the greater world. Instead of sending an avalanche of snow yanked from the ground crashing into her brother, Katara settled for pulling from the humid air instead.

Where Sokka found the time over the last three years to train during days filled from almost dawn to dusk with negotiations and the administrative slog of pulling the world into peace, Katara never figured out. But standing around indoors all day hadn’t worn down his ability to jump out of her ice and water traps or dodge the lashing tendrils of water she flanked herself with and caught his weapons in.

Amid the audience’s cheering and her flushed exertion, Katara smiled at her brother and he smiled back, easygoing and warm. The clear skies chased away any wisps of a memory of another fight over the right to rule; her heart pounded with excitement from the friendly exchange and the soothing blue under her command. And when Katara finally knocked Sokka down definitively, a few minutes later, he unhesitatingly grabbed her outstretched hand, clapped her on her other shoulder, and said, loud and boisterous, “Great fight, you’ll be amazing with Dad.”

Afterwards, after the meal they shared of freshly caught fish and light greens, after a few more months on the looping journey through the Earth Kingdom and too many afternoons clogged with negotiations and reassurances and appeasements, the winds finally agreed enough to route their way towards the Fire Nation. Zuko took in the news quietly and Aang, who had been with him for the last year, made up for his silence aplenty.

“It was nice,” Katara said to Zuko after she finished tutting over the bags under his eyes that his light makeup no longer hid.

His eyes glanced left, through the window towards the coronation grounds, and drew back to her within a second. He finally smiled, wider and more genuine than the polite expression earlier, and said, “I’m glad.”

The spirit girl hummed in thought, lazily examining their memories, and ignored the winged snake crackling with electricity arching through the thin incense smoke. “Cursed souls aren’t supposed to get leeway after death,” she said. “Which is what you’re asking for, little lord. The ghost whales aren’t under the command of any spirit, nor are they aware of the scoop of their revenge. When a volcano bursts or a tsunami washes ashore, you wouldn’t approach us about those deaths, would you?”

“No,” Zuko admitted through his hard mask. “But this is no natural death. They deserve remembrance and rites to ease their souls, least they haunt the borders between worlds.”

“They deserve dignity,” said Katara.

* * *

In the night, the sea glowed with dissolving bones and bloated fish flesh. Oil lanterns tipped over onto dry wood walls, spilling the flaming harvest no water could put out. The birds danced in the red glow, their black beaks open and screaming among the burnt and rain-starved soy fields. Two weeks after the smoke filled the sky for four dark days, word finally reached the Ministry of Rites in the capital.

* * *

“Dignity,” the girl repeated and blinked, slowly, for the first time. “For their choices? Fishing villages do not hesitate in hunting whales, as you well know, little riptide. Bounties from the sea, I believe the humans call it. That village harvested a whale before. They knew their risks.”

“Dignity in their deaths,” Katara corrected. “They’re trapped now, and their entrapment will only sow further curses in the land. Curses that can easily transfer over into the spirit worlds too.”

“Imbalances,” Zuko began saying but the girl cuts him off with a harsh exhale of her smoke.

She transferred her pipe to her other hand and stood up from the chair, approaching the two standing before her. A twist of her fingers and the pipe shivered and transformed into a thin-necked vase. Glimmers of light shone through the vase’s slim opening. From her robes, the girl pulled out two small saucers. As she set each saucer hovering in the air before Katara and Zuko, she said, “I can hear your thoughts rattling around your heads. Yes, we only take fair trades, let it out, little lord. And here I heard you were supposed to be a refreshingly direct human.”

Zuko breathed in deep, shoring himself up, and Katara squeezed his hand as he offered with polished smooth delivery, “We offer the dignity in our choices on the ends of our reigns in exchange for their release. And only _our_ choices and _our_ dignity.”

The girl twisted her mouth unhappily as she poured out the liquid light. Katara’s eyes watered unwillingly at the brilliance and she blinked away the accumulating spots in her vision. Nudging the saucers towards Katara and Zuko’s free hands, the spirit said, “Only the two of you in exchange for all of them? Arrogant.”

“But heavy enough,” Katara stressed. She made no move for the gold and silver drink.

“Arrogant,” the spirit repeated. “But enough. Fine, your dignity before the sun and moon for their freedom. Drink.”

Zuko took his saucer first and tipped his mask up enough to lift the light to his lips. Slower, Katara copied him.

The sunlight and moonlight slipped over her tongue, clearer than any spring water she ever tasted before and deep as the sky. Cold warmth spilled down her throat and swirled past her spine. The all-seeing and all-consuming depths of the deep ocean and the vast sky sunk heavy into her body, pouring into her blood and washed blue through all her red. Sharp ice clung to her lips.

A shiver passed through Zuko’s hand in hers and he handed his emptied saucer back to the spirit. Katara’s cup also placed in the girl’s hand, the spirit snapped her left hand and winked out of view. Another shiver wracked through Zuko and he said through numb lips, “I’m never going to be able to drink sake again. I’m ruined.”

Startled, Katara laughed. “It was incredible, wasn’t it?” She glanced out into the dark, past the four pillars and the vanished bone chair and down the long, long stairs. “How do we leave?”

“With me.”

Gentle, Yue smiled at them and held out her hands. Unhesitating, they placed their hands in hers and before the moon spirit pulled them back home, Katara said, “Thank you.”

“Anything for my friends,” she said, demure, and the black rolled away into white.

**Author's Note:**

> So, _bakekujira_ are associated with heavy rain, but I think a whale skeleton bearing curses and devastation suddenly appearing on what should have been a perfect day makes for better surreal horror.


End file.
